I like books. This is a fact that should come as no especial surprise. Books are one of only two vices I profess to having, the other of course being the magically revitalising nectar that is tea. Over the years I have accrued quite a substantial library, as I discovered to my peril when it came time to move house. I’ve performed a few rough counts in the past, primarily to get a rough idea as to just how much cover I needed for my contents insurance. However, I’ve never actually taken an inventory of the whole library. So this weekend, while taking a break from saving the galaxy and allowing my eyes to stop bleeding from all the pixelated violence I had committed, I decided to check out Goodreads.
Category Archives: Ramblings
Dystopia, Why?
It rained sometime during the night. The world’s been distorted into shades of wet greys and everything has a slight sheen to it. The sky’s still an ominous shade of grey as if it’s threatening to drown the world again, whether this proves to be an empty threat or not remains to be seen. Back home rain made everything seem fresh and clean, but down here? Everything seems just as dirty and foul as it did yesterday when it was dry. It’s like a particularly hideous ornament has been polished up because guests are coming round. Polished or not, they’ll still hate the damn thing. I’m once again sitting in my grotty old desk chair, it’s made of faux leather. It’s got a great big tear across the seat where the seams have split, leaving a ragged maw with atrophied lips and misshapen teeth of grey sponge. I’ve tossed a grey tartan blanket over the top to hide the worst. It’s made of acrylic and I like to snuggle into it when it gets too cold. It’s always too cold in my house. I’m choking down factory milled bread slathered in hydrogenated vegetable oil made to imitate churned bovine lactate, this is turn is coated in the black, tarry dregs of a brewer’s vat. It’s all being washed down with a tepid, brown liquid that might once have been tea. I’m a product of the lower middle-class, struggling under the yoke of a disconnected government of rich-elite who hate their population. The divide between the rich and the poor widens daily, inflation spirals ever-upward, the economy’s in recession and the living wage of the average working stiff isn’t going up. The powers that be are trying to introduce plans to monitor all forms of electronic communication. Dystopia doesn’t seem so far away after all. Or perhaps I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I don’t think anyone can argue that living in a dystopian world would be pretty awful. But why is it that dystopian fiction is so popular and so prevalent?
Girl with bow and arrow - The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games came out last week to some pretty rave reviews. As of yet I haven’t heard anyone say a bad thing about it. I was even thinking of going to see it this weekend so that I had a better idea as to what everyone was going on about. But it was cold outside so I stayed inside where there was tea. It is the most recent in a long line of dystopian films to grace cinema screens. We’ve had The Matrix, Blade Runner, Mad Max, Logan’s Run, the list goes on, spiralling all the way back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927. The world of books is littered with similar pieces, from the comic-book worlds of Transmetropolitan and Watchmen, to the familiar fields of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New world and more or less everything that Philip K. Dick ever wrote.
In Memoriam
I’m not emotionally equipped to deal with most things, least of all death. Last Tuesday, slightly before half past nine in the evening, I received a phone call and through stifled sobs was told that my friend James was dead. It’s the sort of news that knocks the wind right out of you. It was one of those moments where life pops up and shouts “Oh hi there! You’re not using that heart are you? Great! Now let me carve it out of your chest with this comically large spoon. And since I’m here I may as well take your digestive tract too. You don’t need that. Thinking about it I’m sure you can manage just fine if I just hollow you out completely.” When life decides to take a swing at you it always swings in with the haymaker. I’m never quite sure how to react to a bombshell like that. I probably spent an hour just staring off into space trying to get my head round it. Even now, almost a week later it hasn’t really sunk in. Part of me still believes it’s all just an elaborate joke. Denial makes it easier, it makes the unbearable just a little bit easier to swallow. It tides you over until the pain isn’t quite so sharp, until it’s just a little easier to live with. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Despite the inevitability and ubiquity of death, humanity seems to try so very hard to avoid recognising it as even there. Bit the bullet, bought the farm, shuffled off their mortal coil, pushing up the daisies, checked out, cashed in their chips, the list goes on. We avoid it because it hurts. It hurts like all manner of hell.
Vocabulary
I HAVE COME FOR YOUR NOUNS!
There are a great many things wrong with the English language. It’s an unwieldy and bloated monster of a thing, a linguistic Yog-sothoth and just as ubiquitous and just as malign. All that finds itself in its path is destroyed, consumed and repurposed. It is a language of empire, of colonialism and of tyranny. It is my mother tongue and for that I count myself immensely grateful. I dread to think what it’s like to actually learn English as a second language, especially considering how much of a mess of it we native speakers make. Our syntax is a twisted bastardisation of something faintly Germanic and our verb conjugation is, at its very best, completely nonsensical. It has rigid and unbreakable rules that must be followed, but only if you feel like it. It has a vast and intricate system of grammar that is almost universally ignored. We have in excess of four hundred homophones in regular use and perhaps most annoyingly of all, just as soon as you think you’ve got the entire thing licked, when you finally think you can say “English, thou art Conquered! Thou art like unto my bitch [yo!]” it goes and changes. It is fluid and ever-changing, forever in flux, it cannot be mastered or tamed and it cannot be killed, it is a lexical Lambton Worm. But all of this is not without its upsides.
One of those Moods…
Last weekend was weird. Seriously weird. Not through any particular event but just from how it felt upstairs in the brain department. Even walking home from work on Friday night I could feel myself slipping into what I refer to as “one of those moods…” It’s hard to explain what one of these moods is like. It’s a bizarre and surreal no-man’s-land between anger and depression. It wells up from deep inside and just takes over. It feels like flying and falling at the same time. It swings pendulum like from one extreme to the other. On Saturday afternoon I was on the back-swing from misery when I started to get angry, really angry. When anger rears its vitriolic head I tend to get very vocal; I tend to get very… political. My friends love it when I’m like this, they derive immense amusement from my directionless, shouty rants against the injustices of the world.
This is exactly what happened this Saturday. With all the feckless stumbling and hypocritical posturing in the modern political world there is no shortage of things to be angry about. So I opened up a big fat can of righteous indignation and went to war on my keyboard.
RAWR!
Bon Anniversaire
Well here we are then. This Friday the blog turns one. I’m not entirely sure how that happened. I started out on my journey into the seething maelstrom of the blogosphere with no destination in mind, no plan, no back-up, no ideas worth a damn. I left myself at the mercy of whatever fevered and diseased thoughts popped into my head, flying my blog airship by the seat of my mind-pants. Because my mind does indeed have pants, for it is a decent and upstanding mind that does not believe in gross public mental-nudity. Over the year the blog’s evolved from a rudderless catastrophe to a blog where I talk about writing and share what I create as I vainly try to make my way into a world saturated by a million other wannabes. The blog is still a catastrophe, but it is, at least, a directed and focused catastrophe.
I honestly didn’t think I’d make it as far as I did. I thought I’d try my very bestest the churn out a post a week, on something, anything. I expected to make it a couple of months before losing patience and motivation; the blog-ship would start to list dangerously, it’d start to lose lift and I’d start sinking through the foetid clouds like a big, fat stone made of cloth and iron. Finally crash landing in the great blog-graveyard beneath the swirling mists of words, the place where the discarded shells of old blogs lie strewn across the landscape, their corpsey husks half buried in toxic, black mud. This didn’t happen. I’m still going, fifty-seven posts and I’m still going. Sure, there was a blip in July but I was moving house and had no internet. As soon as I had internet I fixed that, I kept going. And I sure as hell don’t plan on stopping.
New Tools, New Beginnings
I am going to make a meandering and circuitous route towards a point, so please bear with me.
This, in many ways, is a week that a small part of me thought that I would never see. Way back in the mists of time when I was still in high school, before even my GCSEs I was a very different person to what I am today. That person is very much a stranger. Admittedly we share similar traits and predispositions, but the similarity is that of freshly hewn marble and a finished sculpture. In these less than halcyon days one of my now tragically estranged friends made a prediction, an eerie prophecy that has rung down through the years. I suspect it was made in jest, a throw away comment, but it’s niggled at the back of my mind for an awfully long time.
“By the time you’re 25, you’ll either be dead or sectioned”
For years I used this pronouncement of my inevitable doom as funny little anecdote when talking to people in the pub. Normally people who still lingered in that awkward purgatory of “not being complete strangers but not yet friends.” We all laughed, fun and merriment was had by all. Then I turned 25 and suddenly it wasn’t quite so funny.
Devaluation
In the past I have made my opinions on eBooks very clear, I’ve waxed lyrical about the virtues of bookmarksand my joy and delight in all things solid and real. This love for solidity and realism has made me realise something about which I didn’t bring up in my initial tirade against them, something which in essence is far removed from a simple personal preference, something which has slightly sinister overtones. The rise of the internet and the relentless march of technology and data which followed has made a profound impact on modern life, it has changed the very way we view the world. This change isn’t static either, it’s a change that continues to evolve and shape society. I’m just not entirely sure if it’s a good thing any more.
Toasty
Things in the Post
I like getting things in the post. I always have and I certainly hope that I always will. The thing about post is that there’s always a little sense of anticipation before you tear back the crisp white paper fold of the envelope or rip into the resilient grey plastic of those weird waterproof jiffy bags. Amazon even have a tiny little cardboard pull strip on their small packets, It never seems to work properly though. The delight of opening the post is like a tiny, little, private birthday present, or a brief personal Christmas. Getting post of any sort, for me at least, makes me feel important almost special. And then there’s the little guessing game before you open as you try to work out what’s inside, as you test the weight and check the return address info on the back. It’s an almost spiritual experience. Were I to get a letter from the bank that simply read:
Dear Sir,
We have spent all of your money on whores and caviare. We decided this was the best use of your money as you are poor and by extension unimportant.
Love and kisses
Fat-Cat McBankerson
New Bankerson Bank Corporation
– “We are proper gits”
I would, of course, be slightly miffed that I wasn’t at least invited round to Fat-Cat McBankerson’s swinging bachelor pad for of an evening of snorting caviare off a hooker’s belly (that’s what you do with caviare right? I wouldn’t know, I’m poor.) But I would still be happy I got a letter. I like post. Post is fucking magical.
Last week I received something that I’ve been awaiting with bated breath for quite some weeks. Inside two, yes two, waterproof, plastic jiffy bags (sealed at opposite ends no less) all the way from Lake Stevens in Washington State, Americaville, came this sexy little thing:
That’s not glare from the window, that’s dramatic lens flare!
Losing Letters
You never realise how much you’ll miss something until it is gone. Something which had previously been mundane and common place leaves a yawning void. I have been recently betrayed by my keyboard. In that, the letter “c” has completely ceased to function. Now I’m in the purgatory of a depleted alphabet until such time that I get round to buying a replacement. But of course it can’t replace it with any old keyboard. Oh no, it will have to be the same model as the one I’m currently using. A model which is plagued with the inherent problem of letters ceasing to work. In the case of the keyboard before my currently one it was the cluster of “b, n and m” that stopped working. Why do I remain so faithful to this fundamentally flawed lump of technology? It’s because after using this type of keyboard, with its ever so slight curved arrangement of the letters, since 2005 I find it extremely inconvenient and discomforting to use anything else. This was the keyboard on which I taught myself to touch type, I know where the keys are, I can feel every tiny, little nuance it has and I so love the distinct clack of the keys, when the fury of the writing is upon me it sounds like the bastard child of a thunder-storm and galloping hooves. But in the interim I must make do.
It taunts me
The Rogue Verbumancer 